Anti-Trumpers like me see the presidential election as a reckoning for American democracy. For many Donald Trump supporters, it is a simple matter of dollars and cents.

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks.”

I talked to men and women, white people, Black people, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. They looked different, but they sounded the same. Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump.

If the nation is a body politic, then working people are the nerve endings that feel its economic spasms most acutely. While some of their reaction is the result of chronic, decades-long conditions, the most noticeable pains have presented themselves in the past few years. The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to help them solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.